668
Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
668 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
58061 readers
31 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I haven't used Google for awhile now. It just became an ad-ridden hellhole.
Do people not have ad blockers anymore?
That's not what we're talking about. Ad blockers don't do anything to fix Google's search algorithm
I understand the post OP but I'm replying to a comment. Specifically this part...
I take it what OP meant is that a lot of the top results are ads - even if they aren't shown as such. Like how half the crap uploaded by large youtubers these days is pretty much an ad for a specific product, although there's no way to tell until you click onto it (unless you use sponsorblock)
The ads you see injected in your search result as "sponsored" are not the only way Googles Ad interests affect your search results. They are actively manipulating your search queries to make them point more towards their paying customers wanted result without you noticing.
Yeah. That's why i use an ad blocker
that's not something your adblocker can suppress
It absolutely is.
how would your adblocker affect something going on in googles backend?
It affects what is displayed to me in the browser window. No backend needed. It sees "sponsored" and hides them.
And if you read my comment again, that's not what I was talking about
Fair enough. But i will say that with the adblocker i can find what i need a lot easier and is usually a top 3 result if not the first.
Definitely. Not having half of the first page being ads helps a lot
That's why I like Kagi. I do almost anything to avoid ads
deleted
deleted
Not really no.
Kagi has vastly more features. Most are extremely useful. Including privacy.
And the whole "funding a bigot" complaint strikes me as kind of silly. The "partnership" is just them using the Brave search API, no different than they do Google, Bing, and a few others. I even have Brave as one of my sanity check browsers when something doesn't work on Firefox.
Privacy doesn't exist without the ability to compile and self host.
deleted
It's silly to try to avoid doing anything that may, in some way support a bigot. They are literally everywhere. Even Gandhi was racist.
It's just the payment info, not the searches. And since their users are their only revenue source, because they aren't selling ads, they have no reason to save searches.
deleted
This seems like a non-sequitur. I don't understand your point here.
Here's the section for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
= In 2017, Beale launched Infogalactic, an English-language wiki encyclopedia. The site was a fork of the contents of English Wikipedia which could be gradually edited to remove the influence of what Beale described as "the left-wing thought police who administer [Wikipedia]". It has been described by Wired and The Washington Post as a version of Wikipedia targeted to alt-right readers.
^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^'optout'.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^
deleted
deleted
deleted
deleted
I did. Didn't find anything about the "funding a bigot" part specifically. So what's the deal with the whole "funding a bigot" thing?
deleted
deleted